Great Moments in Applied Science

The designs were fairly simple: twenty-five dollars worth of random bits from the hardware store, a small compressor, a one-liter bottle, and finally a truck-tire stem. We could have built bigger. We could have built louder. We could have built an electrically ignited butane-powered monster made of hardened steel tubing surrounded by shrapnel catching sandbags (in case of catastrophic failure). Such a device was seriously considered for a long, long period during the planning stages.

The problem also seemed fairly simple when it was presented one evening over drinks: Timmy has a newspaper route. If Timmy delivers the papers to the doorstep he gets a bigger tip. If Timmy delivers the papers to the doorstep he delivers less papers (consequently earning less money). Timmy presented the problem as a good example for calculus optimization in the real world. I should mention here that Timmy is also a twenty-two year old Mathematics major who isn't really named Timmy. His solution involved a lot of complicated math based on some shaky formula modeling. Our solution involved a specially constructed newspaper cannon. ENGINEERING 1. MATHEMATICS 0.

Planning the damned thing actually turned out harder than it should have been. The primary problem is the little known fact that if you ask five geeky college-aged males how to construct a cannon out of common household hardware you're going to get five different cannons based on seven different designs. For our purposes, the designs were quickly pared down to two possibilities. The first was the butane-powered monstrosity that could have, quite frankly, eliminated the need for any car to be involved in the delivery process in the first place. You'd just have to set it up on a roof somewhere and "deliver" the papers until the cops show up. This was a strong contender early on because "If you're going to do this you have to do it right, man". It was rejected because most of us were scared shitless of the goddamned thing. Just for clarification purposes: we are pretty much talking about a pipe bomb with one open end and a newspaper jammed inside of it. That doesn't necessarily mean we won't build it at some later date, but Timmy was rather concerned about sitting next to it. Also butane is expensive.

What we actually went with: A pressurized bottle inside a PVC tube barrel. The bottle sits atop a truck tire stem. A pin is inserted through two holes in the barrel, securing the bottle against the tire stem. The bottle is pressurized, the pin is pulled, and the bottle travels up the barrel forcing the newspaper out. The bottle is prevented from exiting the barrel by two pegs at the end of the barrel. The newspaper is not.

Simple. Efficient. Elegant. Not considered a Class III mortar under federal laws. So we built it.

The evening of the first test fire was like Christmas. We stood at the curb admiring the sleek white cannon while it glistened in the moonlight. It was a glorious phallic-like incarnation of newspaper force projection. We plugged the compressor into the van and gingerly loaded our handiwork with its very first newspaper. With eager anticipation we angled the cannon at a perfect forty-five degrees, and firmly grasped the pin.

!BOOOM! And the newspaper came roaring out of our cannon with all the force of a baseball thrown by a geriatric stroke victim! It landed a whopping two feet from the end of the barrel.

"Dammit!"

"Shit!"

"What the hell, guys?"

"Where are the goddamned numbers?!"

"Last Friday we crumpled them up and tossed them in the back of the van."

There was a mad dash to the van where our original feasibility calculations lay scrawled in crayon across a mess of cocktail napkins, placemats, and a large sheet of butcher paper that had served as our table covering. With this detritus spread across the hood of the van we began to retrace all of our calculations.

From the back of the huddle there was a cry of "Guys, were we working in Metric or English?" and the response was cries of "Metric." and "English." and "Both." and "Neither." It soon became apparent to all that Mathematics and Booze had tag teamed us and screwed us like two-bit whores at a truck stop. Pounds and Kilograms were interchangeable. We were converting freely from Newtons to Joules to Pounds per Square inch by some insane dimensional analysis none of us could make sense of. Kinematic equations slowly morphed into the lyrics to Dead Milkmen songs and back again. An entire system of equations was set equal to a sketch of a turtle wearing a top hat.

"Hey guys, what did you build."

A knot of smokers, predominantly of the female persuasion, came to investigate the source of the loud bang.

"It's a errr... umm..."

"It's a tennis ball cannon."

Someone booted the newspaper under the van. Someone else balled up our equations and tossed them in a nearby trashcan.